Surely the question of Bards will bring in the question of the role communities and the greater setting social structure will play in the game. If characters automatically improve, and require no formal links to the local setting then the social abilities of a bard are of limited value. If the characters need the local community for training etc, such as in RuneQuest where significant magical poerr is tief to groups witj tjrir agendas, then the social skills of the bard become much more important.
What mechanical value should bards have (sans intrinsic magic)?
Tonguez
A suffusion of yellow
Not really, DnD has always assumed that Charisma is an inherent ability that makes others have positive feelings towards you regardless of social relationships. A Bard simply taps into that inherent quality and has learnt to use it to advantage
System Ufera
First Post
I suppose I should note here that, the way my game currently works, there's something called Disposition, which determines the difficulty of interacting with them. Having a high Charisma and/or whatever skill you're using will certainly help, of course, but if someone doesn't like you that much, getting them to do favors for you will become more difficult. It's basically the same way the rest of the game works; the game works on a percentile roll, and in order to succeed, you must roll beneath your character's Talent (the sum of your abilities and things contributing to your success) and above the Difficulty of the task. So, for asking for a favor from an NPC, say if the PC had a Charisma of 25 and a Diplomacy of 30, and no other factors contributed, their Talent would be 55. If the NPC were a total stranger, and the favor was a relatively easy task, the Difficulty would be 10.
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